The Legacy of Lehr (15 page)

“What the—”

Faster than a man his size had a right to move, Mather was beside the cage, peering in at the slaughtered Lehr cat and automatically activating the big cage scanners. The dead cat's mate, the smaller of the two females, stood her ground, her wails turning to snarling defiance as Mather tried to look closer. The Rangers did not move, too shocked and stunned even to murmur among themselves as to how the thing could have happened.

CHAPTER 8

“I'm sorry, Doctor, but both doctors probably will be occupied for at least another hour,” a nurse told Wallis when she entered the outer reception room in Medical Section and asked to see Shannon. “Please excuse me. I have to get back.”

The nurse had come out only to dispense a headache remedy to an adolescent boy, who turned anxiously to Wallis as the woman disappeared back into the innards of the medical complex.

“She called you
doctor
,” the boy said, almost accusingly. “Are you a medical doctor?”

Wallis gave the boy a reassuring smile. “Yes, but I'm not part of the crew—just a passenger like you.”

“Well, do
you
know what's going on?” the boy insisted. “People are getting pretty scared. Somebody said that there are some big blue cats down in the hold and that one got out during the night and killed someone.”

“Oh? Who told you that?” Wallis asked. “It can't have been anyone very responsible, to go spreading such rumors.”

“Then it isn't true?” the boy replied. “Well,
that's
a relief! They
are
handling some kind of medical emergency in there, though. I think it has to do with one of those aliens.”

“Really?”

“Hmmm.” The boy nodded as he drank down whatever the nurse had brought him for his headache. “Right after I got here, one of the security guards brought in one of those aliens that bundle up all the time—with the feathers on top of their heads.”

“An Aludran,” Wallis supplied.

“Yeah, I guess so. He looked awfully shaky. They took him inside, and it was ten minutes or so before anybody came out to see what I needed.” The boy grimaced and rubbed at his temples. “I think I'll try a nap, to get rid of this headache. Maybe it'll be gone by dinnertime.”

“I'm sure it will,” Wallis said politely.

But when the boy had gone, and a quick glance outside revealed no one coming, Wallis went cautiously to Shannon's office door and touched the latch plate. To her surprise, the door slid back immediately. Heartened, she slipped inside and closed it behind her, heading immediately for the master console on Shannon's desk.

The controls were clearly labeled. Running her finger down the row of monitor switches, Wallis tried surgery first—empty, except for an orderly cleaning up—then looked in briefly on one of the treatment rooms, where Shannon and an assistant were performing an autopsy, presumably on the murdered engineer. After that, she punched up surgical recovery. Deller's back blocked most of her view of the bandage-swathed patient he tended, but the erratic life readings Wallis called up on another monitor identified the patient as Aludran—an Aludran very close to death. A crimson-robed Muon sat close by, his feather-crested head bowed over a bandaged hand that trailed tubes and wires, so the patient could only be the unfortunate Ta'ai.

Sighing helplessly, Wallis shook her head and flicked quickly through the half dozen infirmary rooms, glancing only in passing at other patients sleeping or resting, a few of them attended by a tense-looking nurse or orderly. Then she stopped to look more closely as another alien crest caught her eye. It was Ta'ai's brother, the quick, articulate Bana, sitting dejectedly on the edge of the bed where the technicians had left him after drawing his blood for Ta'ai. He was shivering, despite the thermal blanket he had pulled around himself against the cold of the ship's normal environment, but his own discomfort seemed to affect him very little. His eyes were fixed unwaveringly on the view screen a few meters across the room—the monitor in Ta'ai's recovery room—and occasionally he swayed weakly and shuddered. Once, his slender hand reached out as if to hold the motionless image on the screen before him, but the very act betrayed his knowledge of its futility. Only a miracle could save Ta'ai now, and miracles seemed to be in short supply.

Wallis watched for several seconds, sensing the despair that the little alien must be feeling, then noted the location of the room she was viewing and switched off her console. Less than a minute later, she was entering the room. Bana turned around as she came in, recognition flickering in the pained yellow eyes.

“Why have you come? Have you not done enough?”

“I'm sorry about Ta'ai,” Wallis murmured, moving around to sit on the end of the bed near Bana. “I know that you hold us responsible because we brought the cats aboard the
Valkyrie
, but—Bana, I don't know how to say this without its sounding as if I'm just trying to defend the cats, but Mather—Commodore Seton—and I aren't convinced that the cats are to blame.”

“Not to blame?” Bana interrupted hotly. “How can cats not be to blame? You saw body of first passenger killed, Doctor. You see Ta'ai, dying there on screen. How can you say cats be not to blame?”

Wallis exhaled heavily. “I can't prove it yet, Bana. But I
can
tell you that Commodore Seton found an electronic device near the cats, after the first man was killed. It was putting out a psychotronic—a mental ‘sound'—that made the cats angry and afraid—and also everybody guarding them: the Rangers, the crewmen. And it may have been what upset Muon so much the night before.”

“Electronic device?” Bana said blankly. “Machine?”

“That's right, a machine,” Wallis agreed, trying to shift her terminology to a vocabulary that Bana could understand. “Maybe the cats didn't scare Muon at all. Maybe the machine scared Muon, but he thought it was the cats. Maybe someone put the machine there to make the cats angry and afraid and then killed the people, so it would look as if the cats killed them.”

“Why someone want to do that?” Bana asked. “Besides, we know cats kill people on ship. Ship's officers find fur and cat tracks. Muon see death in worship trance. Now you say maybe cats not kill?”

Wallis shook her head. “I can't explain what Muon ‘saw,' Bana. I do know what was found. But the cats
can't
have been out of the hold. We've got a lot of sophisticated equipment down there, which would have told us if they had. It doesn't lie. Besides, our cats are different from the ones you know and fear. Maybe blue cats don't act the same as green ones.”

Bana bowed his head for a moment, then looked up wearily at the screen. “And maybe it not matter what color cats are, Doctor. Ta'ai, my
czina
, my sister, is dying, and they—will not let me be with her.”

His voice broke at that, and he turned his head away and would not look at her. Thoughtfully, Wallis glanced up at the screen again—at Ta'ai connected to her life-sustaining machines, at the solemn-faced Deller monitoring the function of those machines, at Muon hunched beside Ta'ai and holding her hand.

“Why don't you come with me, Bana?” Wallis said, standing to gently lay a hand on Bana's blanketed shoulder. “Much as I'd like to undo what's happened, I can't—but I think I
can
get you in to be with your
czina
.”

Minutes later, she was back in Shannon's office and watching the surgical recovery room again. Deller had left, but Bana now sat on Ta'ai's other side, his very presence apparently strengthening Muon, at least—though Ta'ai's life readings grew weaker with each passing minute.

Satisfied—for there was nothing more she could do for Bana or for Ta'ai—Wallis changed the scene again until she relocated Shannon. The younger physician, the autopsy completed, was stripping off soiled surgical gloves and gown while she listened to a concerned-looking Deller. He spoke too low for the microphones to pick up what he said, but Shannon's face fell at his words, and she stood silently for several seconds after he left. Then, as her assistant began gathering up the surgical instruments they had used, Shannon reached wearily above the table and removed a data cassette—and headed for the door. Wallis heard a door sigh open and closed in the outer office, and quickly turned off the console as footsteps approached.

“What are you doing here?” Shannon asked dully as she entered and tossed the data cassette onto the console. She pulled off a blue surgical cap and shook out her short curly hair, then sank down in a chair opposite Wallis and closed her eyes, leaning her head against the chair back.

“I thought I might be able to help,” Wallis said, watching the younger woman carefully. “I guess it's been pretty bad, hasn't it? And not enough sleep to deal with it well, either, I'll bet. We shouldn't have hit you with that vampire business last night. How much sleep
did
you get?”

Shannon shrugged but did not open her eyes. “Who knows? Two hours? Three? Deller called me to surgery just before six. It's nearly ten now, and already I've been through an extensive surgery and an autopsy, on top of what happened yesterday. My work isn't half over, either. There'll be another autopsy before the day is out. Ta'ai isn't going to make it.”

“I know. I took the liberty of monitoring her while I was waiting for you. I suppose Deller told you I made him let Bana in to be with her. I hope you don't mind.”

Shannon opened her eyes look at Wallis, then shook her head, though she made no effort to rouse from her comfortable position. “Of course not. He should have been there all along. In all the confusion, somebody obviously forgot to move him. We pulled quite a lot of blood from him when he first came in, hoping it might buy her a little more time, but the poor fellow could only give so much. She was pumping it out almost as fast as we could pump it in.”

“I know. It won't be much longer.” Wallis sighed and leaned over the desk to punch up Ta'ai's readings again. “Damn, look at that. She's started to go flat already.”

Shannon grimaced, then sat forward far enough to insert her data cassette and order a correlation run between this one and the previous day's report. She glanced at Wallis again as she sat back and waited for the readout.

“I don't think I'm cut out to be a company doctor, Wallis,” she said, rubbing a hand over her eyes. “Do you know what the captain had the audacity to remind me, when we were floating Ta'ai into surgery? That the murder of a passenger aboard a Gruening ship can do terrible things to the company's reputation. Not a word about Ta'ai. He was worried about the company's image.”

“Well, I suppose that's part of his job,” Wallis ventured. “He doesn't strike me as a hard-hearted man. Rigid, perhaps, but—”

Shannon sighed explosively and sat forward to watch the readout begin crawling up the screen.

“Oh, I don't suppose I should really blame him,” she said. “Don't let on that you know, but he's marking time until he can retire to a planetside assignment. He's developed a heart condition that—”

She broke off and sighed again as she continued to read the data, shaking her head as she tapped the screen with a fingernail. “Wallis, look at this report. You're going to have to face facts. Throats torn out, chests and arms slashed to ribbons, the bodies nearly drained of blood—and each one, Ta'ai included, had a tuft of blue cat hair in his or her fist. It's almost as if the beasts left a calling card!”

Wallis stood up for a better angle on the screen. “Yes, almost a little too perfect, don't you think?”

Sighing wearily, Shannon shook her head. “Come on, Doctor. I know you want to believe that the cats didn't do it, but we've been over this before. The blue fur is definitely Lehr cat fur. And what else could rip those bodies like that? Phillips's neck was snapped like a twig.”

“I know what it
looks
like,” Wallis answered, continuing to scan over the readout. “I still want to run a comparison of the fur found on the bodies with samples from our cats.”

Shannon looked at her in disbelief, then sat back and exhaled violently, chasing a stylus around the desk top with one forefinger.

“When someone can get into the hold to
get
those samples, I'll be happy to do that, Doctor! And when I do, are you next going to tell me that, sure, the victims were killed by a Lehr cat, only it wasn't one of
your
Lehr cats? I wonder if you'd care to speculate as to where a fifth cat could be hiding aboard the
Valkyrie
, or how it would have gotten here!”

“All right, I agree, it's farfetched,” Wallis said. “When none of the logical explanations fits, though, one has to try the illogical ones.” She scanned over the next few lines in the report, then glanced across at Shannon again. “I understand that there were cat tracks on the floor near Phillips's body and that he had a bloody force-blade in his hand. Cat blood?”

“I'm still waiting for the lab work on that,” Shannon replied sullenly. “But frankly, that's the least of my worries just now. We've got nearly eleven hundred passengers aboard this ship, and eight hundred crew, and every one of them is getting jumpy. The word has gotten out, and a lot of them can't sleep—or don't want to—and there were a couple more witnesses who found or saw this morning's victims before we could secure the scenes. They're sedated now, and I'll have to do memory wipes on them before too many more hours pass, but—damn it, Wallis, I can't wipe out the memories of everyone aboard this ship!”

“I don't envy you your job,” Wallis said lamely. “If there were something more I could do, you know I would.” She shrugged helplessly, and Shannon sighed and managed a wan smile.

“Look, I'm not blaming you. I guess I'm not even really blaming your cats, for certain—though you have to admit that the evidence looks pretty damning. At this point, I'm almost tired and desperate enough to even believe your vampire hypothesis, if you could produce a likely suspect.” She grinned wearily. “You see what measures I'll stoop to, to get this situation off my back?”